Shawn Prestridge, Lead FAE Engineer and US FAE Team Manager IAR Systems
2021 may be the most highly anticipated year in quite some time, and for many reasons. In the embedded space, the biggest challenge will be the continued pressure to improve quality yet still deliver faster, especially with the rapid growth of the IIoT, IoT, 5G, AI, and cloud/edge computing.
In today’s embedded development, there is an essential need for automated processes to ensure quality, and to run builds and tests continuously. More and more companies are bringing this to the next level through the practice of Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) in their Linux-based build environments, automating the release process and making it possible to deploy the application at any time. This is being driven by the unprecedented growth of the IoT, 5G, AI, and cloud/edge computing.
Embedded teams are completing software updates faster than ever, which can be challenging in embedded software, where a small error can render a system inoperable. CI uses a robust tool set to inspect code quality and ensure it conforms to safe, reliable coding practices and then automatically subjects the code to a rigorous battery of tests designed by the QA engineers to ensure it performs as expected. This class of automation improved development practices across industries. Automated CI essentially forces developers to write code following best practices and as people find new and better ways to add to automated testing, it will lead to the use of local copies of code analysis that desk-checks code and before it goes into a formal build. Developers will want to be sure their code is reliable before others see it in the continuous integration output.
